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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoCraig Holman | DISPATCH (Aboard WBNS chopper 10)A haze covers Downtown on June 8, 2011, as a temperature of 94 degrees cooks pollutants into a blanket of smog. Central Ohio recorded 12 smog alerts that year and 21 last year.

The absence of smog alerts in central Ohio this summer is a sign that people are breathing easier, particularly those sensitive to air pollution.

But what’s been great news for asthma sufferers is only a marginal improvement for Ohio environmental officials who are still on the hook to comply with a 2012 federal mandate to eliminate smog in Franklin, Delaware, Licking, Knox and Madison counties.

Relatively low temperatures and frequent storms have kept smog at bay this summer, producing just two unhealthy-air alerts in June. But federal officials judge the quality of central Ohio air over a three-year span. With 21 smog alerts last year and 12 in 2011, central Ohio still violates a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency health standard.

The Ohio EPA has until

July 2014 to submit a plan to reduce smog in central Ohio. Solutions can include such things as requiring that higher-priced, lower-polluting gasoline be sold during summer months.

“It’s too early to know what we could do,” said Heidi Griesmer, an Ohio EPA spokeswoman. “We don’t have all of our modeling done.”Smog grows on hot, stagnant days when the sun cooks pollutants from cars, trucks, power plants and factories. It irritates lung tissue, triggering asthma attacks and worsening other chronic respiratory problems.

Though average smog concentrations have steadily dropped in central Ohio, federal standards have become increasingly more restrictive. The current standard, enacted in 2008, limits smog to a concentration of no more than 75 parts per billion in the air. Before that, the standard was 85 parts per million.

Shelly Kiser, advocacy director for the American Lung Association of Ohio, said the U.S. EPA ignored its own science advisers who determined that health problems can occur at 60 parts per billion.

“That’s what it should be to be strong enough to actually protect people’s health,” Kiser said.

Griesmer said the most-recent three-year average, which includes this summer, puts central Ohio at 80 parts per billion. The areas in and around Cincinnati and Cleveland have the same three-year average.States and counties that don’t meet the federal standard risk the loss of federal highway transportation funds and tougher air-pollution limits on new or expanded power plants and factories.

Meeting the standard in Columbus likely will mean more work for the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and its panel of central Ohio advocacy groups and business leaders who advise the Ohio EPA. Evelyn Ebert, MORPC’s air-quality program manager, said solutions are still being discussed.

Andrew Conley, a MORPC committee member and the program manager for the Clean Fuels Ohio advocacy group, said he hopes that a trend toward more fuel-efficient, less-polluting cars will help cut smog. Those include natural gas-powered cars, trucks and buses.

“As more alternative-fuel-powered vehicles get on the road, you will see reduced (pollution),” Conley said.